The Sum of Our Days Read Free Page B

a daily, and more or less truthful, version of essential as well as trivial events, these pages are subjective. Willie told me that The Infinite Plan was a map of his course through life, and added that it was a shame that the actor Paul Newman was a little old to play the part of the protagonist, in case it was made into a film. “You must have noticed that Paul Newman looks like me,” he pointed out with his usual modesty. I hadn’t noticed, but I didn’t know Willie when he was young, when surely they were as alike as two peas in a pod.
    The publication of the book in English came at a bad time for me; I didn’t want to see anyone, and the idea of a book tour frightened me. I was still sick with grief, obsessed by what I might have done, but hadn’t, to save you. Why hadn’t I recognized the incompetence of the medical staff in that hospital in Madrid? Why hadn’t I immediately taken you out of there and brought you back home with me to California? Why? Why? I closed myself in the room where you lived your last days, but not even in that sacred place did I find peace. Many years would go by before you became a gentle, constant friend. In those days I felt your absence as a sharp pain that at times brought me to my knees.
    I was also worried about Nico because we had just learned that he, too, had porphyria. “Paula didn’t die of the condition, but from medical negligence,” he insisted to calm me, but he was uneasy, not so much for himself as for his two children, and the third that was on the way; that ominous heritage might have been passed on to them, we would know that when the children were old enough to undergo the tests. Three months after your death, Celia announced that she was expecting another child, something I had already suspected because of the somnambulist’s purple circles beneath her eyes and because I had dreamed it, just as I had dreamed Alejandro and Andrea before they moved in their mother’s womb. Three little ones in five years was ill considered, given that she and Nico did not have steady jobs and also that their student visas were about to expire, but we celebrated nonetheless. “Don’t worry. Every child comes into the world with a loaf of bread under its arm,” was my mother’s comment when she heard. And so it was. That same week we started on the paperwork to obtain residency visas for Nico and his family, thanks to the fact that after five years of waiting I was finally an American citizen and could sponsor them.
    Willie and I had met in 1987, three months before you met Ernesto. Someone told you that I had left your father for him, but I promise you, that wasn’t how it was. Your father and I were together twenty-nine years; we met when I was fifteen and he was soon to be twenty. When we decided to get a divorce I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that a few months later I would stumble upon Willie. We were brought together by literature. He had read my second novel and was curious to meet me when I sped like a comet across northern California. He was more than a little disappointed when he saw me because I am not at all the kind of woman he prefers, but he put up a good front and today he assures me that when he saw me he immediately felt a “spiritual connection.” I don’t know what that would be. As for me, I had to act fast, because I was leaping from city to city on a crazed tour. I called you to ask your advice and you answered, screaming with laughter, why on earth was I asking you if I’d already made the decision to throw myself headfirst into the adventure. I told Nico, and he exclaimed with horror: “At your age, Mamá!” I was forty-five, which to him seemed the threshold of the tomb. That was my clue that I had no time to waste, I had to get down to serious business. My urgency erased Willie’s justifiable caution. I won’t repeat here what you already know and I have